"People who are always praising the past / And especially the times of faith as best / Ought to go back to the middle ages / and be burned at the stake as witches and sages." So wrote Stevie Smith in a memorable little squib. Roman Krznaric is in qualified disagreement. Taking his cue instead from Goethe – "He who cannot draw on three thousand years is living from hand to mouth" – he argues that the best hints for what he calls "the art of living" are to be found in the past. His "Wonderbox" – a version of the German Wunderkammer, a Renaissance cabinet of curiosities – is a collection of historical sketches bearing on various aspects of life: our relationships with each other, with work, with time, with the arts and nature, with travel and with death.

Few of the examples chosen are quite as curious and unexpected as all that. For sensory deprivation, we get Kaspar Hauser and Helen Keller. For thrift and self-denial we get Thoreau and Diogenes. For the ability to swim against the tide, it's Galileo and Tolstoy. For putting oneself in another's shoes, it's Orwell and Gandhi. That said, there are some great little vignettes – the Quaker who, mortified by the success of his shop, tried to talk his customers into buying less; the religious leader who disbanded the cult that anointed him its Messiah; the pioneering survivalist who, on return to civilisation, was fined $205 by the Maine authorities for killing a bear (with his bare hands) out of season.

The virtue of this book is that it takes a number of ideas that we might regard as givens of the natural order of things – or, at least, as traditions of ancient provenance – and makes clear how historically contingent they are. The "separate spheres" idea, for instance – that makes housework and childrearing the job of women and breadwinning the job of men – is not an ancient but a post-industrial notion.

Krznaric provides brisk and apt genealogies of modern conceptions of romantic love and companionate marriage; of the relative novelty of nationalism as a phenomenon, and the 19th-century PR campaign that invented most of the "ancient traditions" of the British monarchy; of the birth of shopping as a leisure activity and the invention of "lifestyle" as a way of embedding consumption in self-esteem; even of the privileging of the visual in the contemporary human sensorium. Krznaric, though he might not self-identify as such, is a bit of a Marxist: the rot, in most cases, set in with the industrial revolution and reached intolerable levels with late-capitalist industries dedicated to manufacturing demand. At the spine of his book, intellectually, is the project of exposing the way culture passes for nature. Hooray for that.

Where he fails, though, is to historicise his own prejudices. He at no point really explains the criteria by which this example from history should be understood as the compelling one rather than that. You could just as easily write a self-help book explaining that the good life is to be found in grotesque orgies of overeating as per the Regency, opium addiction as per Coleridge, ritual sacrifice as per the Mayans, slave ownership as per George Washington, plural marriage as per Abraham or pederasty as per those wise Athenians. The fact that the lessons Krznaric finds in his wonderbox end up coinciding with the bromidic formulations of every self-help book not inspired by Ayn Rand is, of course, itself a historical accident.

"I believe that the real monuments worth visiting are people," he intones. "It is seldom easy to close the gap between our beliefs and our actions," he warns. "Anybody who feels that the main point of work is to make money should beware that having lots of it is rarely an effective way of achieving personal fulfilment," he reveals. What is it about late capitalism that allows a profitable literary industry to be built on telling us we should appreciate simple pleasures, get back in touch with nature, express ourselves creatively, attend to human relationships rather than material things, come to terms with our mortality, and so on? You'll find no answer here.

Krznaric holds up Mary Wollstonecraft as an example of courage and independent-mindedness, which she was. But when he drops into a blithe subclause a mention of her "several suicide attempts", the alert reader might wonder whether there's such a simple relationship between her cussedness and her skill in "the art of living". He says (quite enticingly) that we should learn from the many ways in which the ancient Greeks understood the notion of love – eros (erotic love), agape (universal love), philia (friendship), pragma (domestic love), ludus (love-play) and philautia (self-esteem). But then he writes: "I am not saying that you should get your pragma from a steady marriage but then satisfy your eros in a series of lustful affairs. That is bound to be a destructive strategy, for sexual jealousy is part of our natures ..." That's a retreat into the comfort zone. Can't jealousy be historicised too?

This is perhaps to make heavy weather of a benign addition to the genre of upmarket self-help books. But the apt quote is one neither from Smith nor Goethe, but Elizabeth Bishop: "Our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown."